Houses and buildings are generally constructed with inclined roofs. The roofs are generally covered with a plurality of overlapping, horizontal, aligned rows of shingles, although the roof may be of the built-up, flat or low pitched type employing rolled roofing materials.
Generally, with a shingle roof, each row includes a plurality of horizontally aligned individual rectangular shingles. The first row is laid across an edge of the roof and is fastened in place. Each successive layer or row is secured to the roof deck with the lower portion overlapping the preceding row sufficiently to cover the fasteners used to attach the immediately preceding lower row. With a built-up, flat or low pitched type roof the material is laid in strips in an overlapping relationship and fastened in place. In modern roofing, the overlapping portion is also secured to the underlying roofing material by a suitable adhesive.
A roof needs periodic removal of the roofing material either in part or in total to improve the life of the roof and to permit inspection of the roof deck. Since the shingles or rolled roofing materials lie flat and have a plurality of fasteners securing them to the roof deck, this is an all but impossible task to accomplish effectively by hand. More importantly, a rough roof deck can adversely affect the tightness of the new roofing and particularly its ability to resist weather and high winds. Numerous tools have been provided to strip roofing material from a roof deck, but all such tools have to date suffered from various drawbacks in actual practice. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,182,390 discloses a manual roof shingle remover tool; U.S. Pat. No. 4,203,210 discloses a shingle stripping tool shaped like a modified spade; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,324,042 discloses a rake-like device rollable across an inclined roof.